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Forum:Wiki Item Rarity Overhaul
Hi There! I find that the wiki's current weapon classification based on rarity is... "sketchy", and degraded to "Clusterfuck", at best. I would like to propose a new classification. While not entirely based on actual rarity or colors, it should be much better suited to actually classifying (the goal of categories) entire classes of weapons, spreading over several colors. My proposal is that all weapons be categorized into 1 (and only 1) of the following categories: * * * * The advantage of this is that for staters, it will put an end to the un-standard classification of uniques: Why should Bone Shredder get Blue, Lady Finger get Green, and Ajax's Spear Purple? Using this scheme, any weapon which is not Unique/Legendary/Pearlescent (for example Pounder, Rage or whatever), is simply qualified as Common. The rest is pretty straight forward. I'd also put the Penetrator and Draco, in the Legendary category. I've already started by writing an article about Unique items, and I also plan to write one about Legendary (that or move the awfully named Rare Items (Above Purple!)). For cleaning up, I request: *The creation of: **Category:Unique *The deprecation of: **Category:White **Category:Green **Category:Blue **Category:Purple *The renaming of: **Category:Orange to Category:Legendary *The keeping of: **Category:Common **Category:Pearlescent This good for everyone? Do I get the green light? or the red light? EDIT: I'd also remove Category:Guaranteed Drops, since it 99% overlaps with Category:Unique. 08:37, April 12, 2011 (UTC) ---- I think that a reference to the actual color on the card is in order. I agree that lady finger is unique but should be: Category: Unique and Rarity: Green That would wholly describe what a lady finger is. But I am unconventional. 09:23, April 12, 2011 (UTC) :What about Patton? And more importantly... Who cares about the Category:Green? I'm sure we've all visited Category:Orange and Category:Pearlescent, because those actually represent a class of things. Who visits green? or Blue? The category Unique and Common is much more interesting to look at, because they actually have an organizational meaning. :Categories like Blue or Green cannot describe an entire class of weapons. If we were categorizing actual individual weapons, then sure, I'd put my HLK Scoped Stomper in Green, and my AR520D Desert Stomper in Purple. But what about the page Stomper, where does it belong? Green? Blue? Purple? 09:36, April 12, 2011 (UTC) Errm... RARITY green. doesn't have to be a category at all. In fact the description can include: This is a unique item that is always green rarity (with appropriate links). That kind of description would include all facts about the gun is all I was saying. I like your idea but do not know the in's and out's of wiki format. I only wanted to say do not lose rarity as a description of a unique weapon. 09:56, April 12, 2011 (UTC) P.S. I do not care about rarity as a category, only as a description. 10:14, April 12, 2011 (UTC) :Ok. Yeah, sure, I'm all for keeping talk of color rarity in the article. I was mainly talking about the wiki categories, and as far as I'm concerned, rarity colors make for piss-poor categories. :I think I should rephrase my plan like this: :*I believe categorization by rarity (ie color) to be irrelevant as far as the wiki is concerned, and outright removed. :*I think guns should be categorized by quality "class": common, unique, legendary, pearlescent. This would create straight forward and un-ambiguous categories, that might actually even have a use to users. :Maybe that's better. 10:30, April 12, 2011 (UTC) That is awesome and I apologize for not being able to make myself clearer in terms of wiki stuff/mechanics. You are definitely on to something and it seems like it would be easier than your gun mechanics project. 10:41, April 12, 2011 (UTC) I would actually be able to help you on this one from time to time. 10:44, April 12, 2011 (UTC) :Thanks. This is actually a pretty low work project, as it is nothing but maintenance edits. I can probably do it in a good full hour (I'd take the opportunity to also overhaul the weapon navboxes). My gun project actually requires content, research, discussions etc... Anyways, I'll get right on it about tomorrow, once I know more people have seen this. 11:40, April 12, 2011 (UTC) I personally give you a . I clicked on category green just to check it out and there's pics of different rarity guns. Doesn't make sense to me - like why is carnage listed on there along with a blue rarity meat grinder? i've seen all different colors of carnages, and why is a blue on the green page? Anyways, you have my support. thank the maker i did not see this page until today. i have several issues with this project but i will limit to the 2 most pressing. even if we all knew that orange weapons are "called" legendary there would still be a need for category orange because they are orange. happy already has a project which would get happy blocked if abandoned. address these two issues and the rest i think is doable/advisable. 20:06, April 12, 2011 (UTC) WHY MUST EVERY PROJECT BE REFERED TO AS OVERHAUL? doesnt anyone read histories any more? :The page was created today, and I clearly stated I wasn't doing anything till I've had a bit of community feedback. don't you read histories any more? ^^. I'm taking a little break from my project, but I'll return to it seriously. Everything will be finished by May 1st (and I had warned I'd take a little bit of time). Also, overhaul, change, tweak... apples and oranges... :Regarding the actual categorizing, your only complaint would be the use of "Legendary" over "Orange"? You're okay with the consolidating of all other colors into "common", as well as putting all uniques into "Unique"? What about Guaranteed drop deprecation? :Imo, Legendary would fit better than Orange to the categorization scheme, and I don't think it would confuse anyone: A category is just a category, and the page (as opposed to category) Orange could just redirect to Legendary. Finally, for total newbies, the word "Legendary" is already color coded orange into our Template:Navbox_Weapon (navbox which is at the bottom of the page near categories, might I add), so I don't think anybody will be confused. 22:13, April 12, 2011 (UTC) ::EDIT: Oh, wait, it would appear I removed the sentence where I said I was waiting for feed back... 22:15, April 12, 2011 (UTC) :: ::I, for one, vote NO. The game itself ranks the weapons by color. People who come to the wiki will be looking for guns based off of color. When they look in their backpack, they see "Orange...Purple...Blue...Green...White." Not "Legendary...Common...Common...Common...." the wiki needs to stay useful to the users of it, and true to the game itself. Color designations need to stay. Consolidation is fine, if you wanted to lump everything below purple into a "Common" category, that's ok. But the idea of getting rid of those color categories isn't the best idea. 00:10, April 13, 2011 (UTC) :: I stuff the ballot box with s. There is not one Orange. There are three levels of Legendary, each corresponding to the three levels of un-Common rarity with the bonus of a Legendary part. Light yellow corresponds to what would be a green weapon if it didn't have a legendary part; thus also with medium orange = blue, and dark orange = purple. Wrt to uniques, Lady Finger is not necessarily always green. Color categories are almost never accurate. Daemmerung 00:26, April 13, 2011 (UTC) There is actually no reason we cannot have both. I am unconventional though and think outside the box of wiki norms. 08:17, April 13, 2011 (UTC) Personally, I'm undecided at the moment for several reasons. * I've got nothing to compare. I do use Category:Guaranteed Drops from time to time when I want to farm some stuff while doing mythbuster work. While that may in fact be "99% overlap" with category:unique I have no way of quantifying that, since there is no other category to compare it to. What's the 1% that doesn't overlap? * The use of Colors versus Rarity Okay, so let's say I'm new to Borderlands. I know the weapons are random, so when I get my first "orange" gun I want to know if it's got good stats or not. At no point do I honestly remember the game calling them "legendary". If I try to search for "Orange" I would get nothing. Okay, so I go to Weapons, scroll down to Rarity, and see that weapons are ranked common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary and pearlescent. Cool. Except we've gone and lumped common, uncommon, rare and epic into "Common", making searching for those terms come back blank. There's also a section in Weapons that points towards Category:Weapons to "see all weapons added to the wiki thus far". Again, I can find Orange/Legendary and Pearlescent, but what if I want to see some examples of these "Epic" guns? Tough? Figure out somehow that I'm supposed to go to "Common" to see everything up through epic? * We're a helpdesk first, encyclopedia second I see what your goal is from a wiki standard. Yes, neat, tidy categories are nice. We also have to remember that we're going to get hits from people who aren't familiar with wiki standards, or categories or any of that and just want to look up some stats. We need to be sure that we're remaining accessible to the users as much, if not more, than the editors. * Final Thoughts Where do you plan on putting Eridian Weapons? Would those remain in their own category? Again, I'm not opposed to this project, I just feel that it's large enough in scope that we really should get an opportunity to see as much of everything side by side as we can. I simply can't commit myself to one standard over the other without toying with them both for a couple of days. 08:39, April 13, 2011 (UTC) :You are confusing categories and pages. Given your example, when a user searches "Orange", it will be a direct match with Orange, which will immediatly redirect to Rare Items (Above Purple!) (try it). There, the FIRST thing that is written is that Rare items come in several colors, ranging from yellow to dark orange and cyan. Now, at the bottom of the page, there will be a section called "See also", and there, the user will find this: :See also: List of Legendary items. :Seriously, how much better can it get? :Further more, if the user searches for "Purple" he (should, but not yet) then be redirect to a page called "Common weapons", which again will explain that common weapons are a form of random weapon that range from white to purple. At the botom, there will be a "see also: list of common items". :There will also be the see also Unique, which is a page, and not a category. :Eridian weapons go in the "common" section, because while hard to fine, they are common from a quality point of view. The mega cannon goes in legendary though. :Now with all that said, everything will be managed by Template:Infobox_weapon. Infobox weapon has both a "color" and rarity field. I'm going to (right now) just make sure all the weapons are correctly filled. From there, regardless of what we choose, everything can be done in nothing more than a 2 line change in the template. 09:04, April 13, 2011 (UTC) :PS: The Chopper is the 1%. 09:04, April 13, 2011 (UTC) EDIT CLASH. WAS SUBMITTING THE FOLLOWING: I am new to wiki so using both categories might be wrong but I still don't see why the color categories can be revamped and linked to new conceptual term categories. orange, blue, common, legendary categories can all exist although may be redundant to the editors. They are, in fact, speaking to two different groups (new or the more knowledgeable). In my eyes this is not redundant since each set of categories are for different groups of people. EDIT: looks like happypal is on it already. 09:07, April 13, 2011 (UTC) :You can have the "Category page" redirect to another page, but you cannot redirect the contents of a category. 09:15, April 13, 2011 (UTC) I actually didn't read everything before I submitted the edit clash. You said it best above: including the newb searches with simple explanations straight into the meat of info is all anyone could ask for. If I had read all that, I would not have bothered to submit my edit clash. 09:25, April 13, 2011 (UTC) I would propose instead that each color redirect to a single page "Rarity" that explains the color-coding rarity system. Categories are as originally proposed by Hallypap. Daemmerung 17:32, April 13, 2011 (UTC) Alright, I'll take these points one at a time. * "You are confusing categories and pages." No, I am not, but thank you. My point is that there are pages that will need to be re-written, even if they're just minor edits. If we'll continue to have redirects, great. My point is that we're adapting a ''third naming convention that is likely to confuse some people. The game categorizes items by color in my inventory, the loading screens state that "rarity" is white->orange, our pages state that rarity is common->legendary in addition to color coding and our categories are going to be common, unique(?) and legendary. ::Happypal reply: I was just saying that when browsing a wiki, you shouldn't be on a category page only you go out of your way. The lay user would end up surfing on pages (some written, some not yet), which would then link to the category pages. 06:33, April 14, 2011 (UTC) *''"There will also be the see also Unique, which is a page, and not a category."'' When did this change? It was part of your original proposal to create this new category. ::Happypal reply: My proposal was to create a category. That doesn't mean there can't be an associated page. Categories aren't meant to be read as articles. *''"Eridian weapons go in the "common" section"'' I'll reserve judgment until I can see how everything looks. *''"Now with all that said, everything will be managed by Template:Infobox_weapon. Infobox weapon has both a "color" and rarity field."'' I don't like that idea one bit. That is the same issue on the page that you have with the categories. Would we call a purple Knoxx's Gold "Epic", as stated on the Weapons page, "Unique" according to categories, or "Common" because it can spawn as a blue or purple? -- 21:37, April 13, 2011 (UTC) ::Happypal reply: How can you not like it. This is just a wiki mechanic. Are you saying it would rather be done by hand? If you are talking about the name of the field... Well its just a template field, and name accuracy is irrelevant. I could have called the fields foo and poop if I wanted to. Unprofessional, but acceptable. To answer your question, Knoxx's gold is a "Purple" "Unique". 06:33, April 14, 2011 (UTC) cont'd just want to catch up here. as this is going "i" would like to see Unique as a category. i should point out that unique, to me, means one occurrence per gamestart. colours as a category can all go to category:common. and i cant thank the OP enough for resurrecting that old project of mine which apparently its time has finally come. i mentioned in conversation to another user that the game does not, in fact, categorize items by colour, it ranks items by colour. so "i" see no conflict there as i think it is splained on common page that all ranks/manufacturers are included. as i see it the real bitch is going to be changing each infobox to common/unique/legendary for rarity categories (this being a wiki convention and not the games doing). we can redirect for the short term but that is a lazy fix. pearlescent gets to stay because it is neither a colour nor any known game classification. how far off the reservation have i gone so far? 23:11, April 13, 2011 (UTC) Where the dickens did "Legendary" come from, anyway? Only place it seems to appear in-game is as the penultimate Atlas material grade. Daemmerung 23:34, April 13, 2011 (UTC) :i can only suspect parallel genesis. like pearlescent it seems to have sprung upon both gbxforums and blandswiki(a) simultaneously . 23:53, April 13, 2011 (UTC) ::The "Pearlescent" rating at least was subsequently canonized by Gbx in DLC3. Hmm. Didn't Gbx adopt the blands rarity color ranking from some other game? Perhas that game used Legendary. Daemmerung 00:07, April 14, 2011 (UTC) Diablo II?-- 05:23, April 14, 2011 (UTC) :Yes and no. In D2 white=normal, purple=magic, yellow=rare, orange=crafted, green=set and gold=unique. Mostly the right colors, but in a different order and no "legendary" category. -- 06:17, April 14, 2011 (UTC) ::Found it! It's from WoW, apparently. (Q.v.) And lo, there they call them Legendaries. Daemmerung 18:17, April 14, 2011 (UTC) Final Thoughts Okay, this page is getting too difficult for me to read. It's becoming obvious to me that I'm arguing totally different points than everyone else, so I'm just going to bow out from the continued conversation. Once things are in place I'll come back and offer my opinions about how things look. For now it just sounds like a mess, but that could just be due to how the conversation is formatted on this page; I can't figure out what statements are counterpoints/clarifications to what. -- 07:22, April 14, 2011 (UTC) I think it is very clear that we are trying to re-categorize diablo II items into colors rather than types with the side proposal to start a new classification in a parallel forum. Other than that, Dr.F gave the green light. 10:05, April 14, 2011 (UTC) Happypal Final Conclusion Here is how this finished, and what I have done: *I have moved the color based categories in a Category:Rank, under Category:Weapons. *The Category:Rarity now houses common, unique legendary and pearleascent. **Both these categories link to each other, and to a mainspace page. There will now be a 1 week effort on my part to tag every weapon correctly. You can see that I have already done repeater pistols and combat rifles. I'll go ahead and deprecate Guaranteed drop for the reason discussed above, after this is finished. Please check it out: *Category:Weapons **Category:Rarity ***Category:Common ***Category:Unique ***Category:Legendary ***Category:Pearlescent **Category:Rank ***Category:White ***Category:Green ***Category:Blue ***Category:Purple ***Category:Orange ***Category:Pearlescent Yes, Pearlescent is in both trees. Orange and Legendary mostly overlap, except for Draco and Penetrator (more proof of the color's inferiority). To be honest, I kept the color categories, but I doubt they'll be useful to anyone. They'll probably end up disappearing. All that's left is consolidating the articles a bit. There, I said it all. I think this is the best solution for the wiki. 10:56, April 14, 2011 (UTC)